Suburb Teen Shoots Teacher At School

March 07, 1986|By Andrew Bagnato and Andrew Fegelman.

The only sound was a click the first time an angry freshman pulled the trigger on a gun pointed at Norma Cooper as she stood before her algebra class in Dolton`s Thornridge High School Thursday morning.

``Everyone thought it was a cap gun,`` said one of the students in the class, John Ellis, 14, of Harvey. ``The teacher told him to put it away.``

But the boy, with his father`s .357 Magnum revolver in his hand, pulled the trigger again, and this time it fired a bullet that passed through Cooper`s left shoulder and struck the blackboard behind her, witnesses said. Cooper, 52, a teacher at the school for 17 years, was listed in good condition Thursday night in Ingalls Memorial Hospital, Harvey.

Cooper walked from the second-floor classroom, her hand covering the wound, while classmates of the 14-year-old boy watched in shock as he went to the back of the room and put the gun to his head.

A second teacher in the classroom, there to use sign language to aid a deaf student, told the class to be seated, although some scattered from the room, witnesses said.

After a short standoff, a Dolton police officer assigned to the school persuaded the youth to surrender his gun. The youth, who reportedly quarreled often with Cooper and had only just returned Wednesday from a six-day suspension, was being held in police custody Thursday night.

Douglas Riner, assistant Dolton police chief, said the boy, who lives in Harvey, was named in a juvenile petition accusing him of attempted murder, aggravated battery and unlawful use of a weapon.

Classmates said the youth and Cooper had quarreled often since the beginning of the semester. He apparently had irritated the teacher by setting a wristwatch alarm to buzz loudly every morning at 10 a.m., in the middle of the day`s algebra lesson. It was for that reason that he had received the suspension last week, other students said.

``The teacher was always telling him to turn it off, and he kept saying he couldn`t,`` said Jason Simmons, 14, who witnessed the shooting.

``He felt that the teacher was picking on him,`` Riner said.

School officials would not discuss the reported suspension, citing confidentiality rules for juveniles. Cooper declined to comment.

None of the students in the class, which has an enrollment of 22, was injured. The students were given the option of going home for the day and were offered counseling by a school counselor, school officials said. Other students at Thornridge, located at Cottage Grove Avenue and Sibley Boulevard in the south suburb, were kept in third-period classes, which start at 9:40 a.m., until about 10:25 a.m.; by that time the youth had been taken away by police.

A friend of the student, Demetrius Curry, said the youth had told several friends he planned to shoot the teacher and had even showed the weapon to one. ``No one believed him because he wasn`t the kind of person to do this,``

said Curry, 14, of Dolton.

They did not even believe it when he pulled the gun from his book bag shortly after class began Thursday morning. Classmates described the youth as being bright and good-natured.

According to witnesses and police, Cooper told the students to be seated shortly after the bell rang, but the youth remained standing near the front of the classroom, about 5 feet from the teacher.

The boy`s father, reached at home, said he was ``very sorry about what happened`` and expressed concern for Cooper`s condition. He declined to comment further. Police said the youth told them his father was a security guard.

Witnesses said the youth did not threaten any of his classmates. ``I asked him why he was doing this, and he just said to tell his father that he`s got his gun,`` Ellis said. ``I don`t know why he did it.``

The plainclothes officer assigned to the school arrived within minutes of the shooting and convinced the youth to surrender the weapon. ``He was pretty scared,`` Riner said.

Principal Barbara Palmer called the shooting ``an aberration`` at Thornridge, which has 2,047 students. ``Everyone is shocked,`` she said.

The trend around the country has been to get tougher with students who assault teachers.

In Carlisle, Ark., a 16-year-old girl who hit her math teacher was tried as an adult and sentenced last year to three years in prison under a new law designed to protect teachers.

A student at Boylan Central Catholic High School in Rockford who shot a teacher in 1983 was sentenced to an indefinite stay in a juvenile dentention home. As in Thursday`s incident, the student had told other students a week before the assault that he intended to shoot the teacher.